


for you will tire, you will fade, you will die

by temporalDecay



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Implied Death, Implied Relationships, Worldbuilding, implied gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 20:36:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1124114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/temporalDecay/pseuds/temporalDecay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>CC: I’m not afraid of you.<br/>)(IC: s ok<br/>)(IC: neither were the others<br/>)(IC: 3B)</p>
            </blockquote>





	for you will tire, you will fade, you will die

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PerfidiousFate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PerfidiousFate/gifts).



> Written for Ladystuck 2013, for the prompt:
> 
>  
> 
> _Condesce!Feferi! I would love anything where SGRUB never happened and Feferi starts taking the whole heiress thing seriously. I would especially be thrilled with anything about the sweeps leading up to her taking over. Political intrigue? Her training for her fight with the Condesce? Tension-filled meetings between them? Dealing with fallout for her radical ideas? Trying to protect her lowblooded friends? Any of these would be fantastic!_
> 
>  
> 
> Hopefully I've made it justice. 0w0

  


* * *

  


__She sought the Studios, beckoning to her side  
An arch-designer, for she planned to build.  
He was of wise contrivance, deeply skilled  
In every intervolve of high and wide--  
Well fit to be her guide. 

__“Whatever it be,”  
Responded he,  
With cold, clear voice, and cold, clear view,  
“In true accord with prudent fashionings  
For such vicissitudes as living brings,  
And thwarting not the law of stable things,  
That will I do.” 

  


* * *

  


)(IC: yo, guppy, whatcha up to

Bizarrely, the first thing that comes to mind, when you receive the unexpected message, is that you finally have unmovable proof to shut Eridan up because fish puns are totally acceptable for an Empress – or Heiress – to use. Through a strange mental fog, you find yourself answering back in stilted, nervous sentences that hardly make much sense, removed from what seems like the reasonable reactions to having a conversation with the Empress herself: you’re not afraid, you’re not even curious. She’s unreal to you, so distant, and yet across the galaxy, she holds the other end of the chain your lusus sank into your pan when she chose you. You fancy you can feel her there, if you close your eyes and concentrate on the sway of waves in your soul, behind the constant foam of your lusus’ whispers, and then wonder if she feels you too, like coral hiding just barely under the surface, deceptively close and yet too far away to touch. 

Six sweeps you’ve lived across that chain, hidden under that curtain of foam and surf, tending to your lusus and your daydreams. Six sweeps you’ve let yourself be swayed by the roll of the waves and the lazy waning and waxing of the moons, until the world felt too small to contain you and the myriad of plans and ideas boiling under your skin. 

Six sweeps, of a swollen, bloated head full of half-conceived notions, until all of a sudden the world abruptly burst forth and opened up into a universe big enough to contain _her_ too, but not big enough to contain you both. 

CC: I’m not afraid of you.  
)(IC: s ok  
)(IC: neither were the others  
)(IC: 3B)

  


* * *

  


__“Shape me,” she said, “high walls with tracery  
And open ogive-work, that scent and hue  
Of buds, and travelling bees, may come in through,  
The note of birds, and singings of the sea,  
For these are much to me.” 

__“An idle whim!”  
Broke forth from him  
Whom nought could warm to gallantries:  
“Cede all these buds and birds, the zephyr’s call,  
And scents, and hues, and things that falter all,  
And choose as best the close and surly wall,  
For winter’s freeze.” 

  


* * *

  


In retrospect, you should have seen it coming. 

It’s all the more painful, because you didn’t, and now it’s all too obvious, all the hints and taunts and warnings. At six, you felt certain of everything. You were sure of yourself and what was coming and each step you were supposed to take seemed easier and easier further down the road. It was just destiny, inevitable like rain and the dance of high-low tide. It didn’t matter if you didn’t know the exact words or the right people or the finer details. Everything would fall into place, eventually, because your lusus sang a new Empress’ hymn when she took you with her into the comfort and safety of the abyss. 

At seven, now you know all you don’t know, with the stark clarity of someone who begins to understand the price behind each unknown. It might be your destiny in the end, but knowing the destination is not nearly as important as realizing what the road to get there implies. Destiny is nothing without sacrifice, but it never occurred to you that it would be someone else who’d paid, it never even crossed your mind it would take something you weren’t willing to give. 

You are untouchable, by virtue of the threat your lusus poises to anyone who so much sneezes the wrong way in your direction. 

But there’s really nothing standing between your friends and the implications of having your favor. 

You find yourself smiling, nonetheless, because despite it all there’s more than one color of blood splattered across the sand, mixing into an ugly, sticky mud. The hive is in ruins, more than it already was, that is, but you can see scorch marks and the ghost of a feral will to survive, a brutal defiance that refused to go quietly along with the inevitable. You feel borrowed pride, and feel hollowed by it, because it’s not yours to keep but you’ll take it anyway. When you reach down to pick a torn scarf, matted with grime and blood, you hear the singsong ping of a message window to torment you. 

CC: )(e wasn’t my moirail anymore.  
)(IC: hahaha, oh gill  
)(IC: you dont think I fucked up his dumb bass to get to you  
CC: )(e didn’t have to die.  
)(IC: shore   
)(IC: he didnt  
)(IC: no one ever )(AS to  
)(IC: not unless i feel like it anyway

  


* * *

  


__“Then frame,” she cried, “wide fronts of crystal glass,  
That I may show my laughter and my light--  
Light like the sun’s by day, the stars’ by night--  
Till rival heart-queens, envying, wail, ‘Alas,  
Her glory!’ as they pass.” 

__“O maid misled!”  
He sternly said,  
Whose facile foresight pierced her dire;  
“Where shall abide the soul when, sick of glee,  
It shrinks, and hides, and prays no eye may see?  
Those house them best who house for secrecy,  
For you will tire.” 

  


* * *

  


)(IC: if nothing else, you make damn interestin choices

You refuse to look away from the screen, to make sure the troll currently snoring bubbles into sopor is still there. You refuse to let the smell of burnt wood and melted sand and curdled blood to claw its way back out of your memory. You smile instead, fingering the bruise of lips to the underside of your chin, skirting the edge of the gills on your throat, before composing a suitable reply. 

CC: you can’t )(ave )(im.  
)(IC: guppy, you know damn fuckin well i can have anyfin i want

You never found the body. You thought the sea had claimed it, when you gave up the hope that he might have found a way to escape. 

)(IC: but its okay, i like mine better

For your eight wiggling day, you received a scepter decorated in garnets and diamonds, and a skull with lacquered horns you know almost as well as your own. 

)(IC: at least its glubbin housebroken already

For your eight wiggling day, you found the corner of your soul dark and twisted enough to wish death upon someone with enough conviction to try and carry out the deed with your own hands. 

  


* * *

  


__“A little chamber, then, with swan and dove  
Ranged thickly, and engrailed with rare device  
Of reds and purples, for a Paradise  
Wherein my Love may greet me, I my Love,  
When he shall know thereof?” 

__“This, too, is ill,”He answered still,  
The man who swayed her like a shade.  
“An hour will come when sight of such sweet nook  
Would bring a bitterness too sharp to brook,  
When brighter eyes have won away his look;  
For you will fade.” 

  


* * *

  


You warned him, he forced your hand. 

You offered him everything he wanted, to join his cause and make his struggle your own, to give him a place by your side. He was everything you always wanted to be, as far as leadership went. He would have been a formidable ally, if only he had listened. 

You warned him, that you were not someone he could capture, that you were in his presence because you wanted to, not because he could force you. 

He was oddly handsome, for a mutant. You think you’d have wanted to look at him wearing a proper uniform, perhaps even make him a lord, just to spite _her_. But he forced your hand and now all he’ll be is a horror story for the survivors to share between them. 

)(IC: heard you hard a party, huh  
)(IC: betcha it was a riot of fun

You ignore the intermittent alerts from Trollian as you work to pacify your lusus, soothing down the outrage until her voice is gone quiet once more. You don’t know how many have died, in the wake of the Cult’s refusal to let you return to your duties, but now all that matters is that you make sure no one _else_ dies. 

You refuse to wonder how was it that they found you, or who might have told them you were so sympathetic to the anti-hemospectrum agenda. 

Sollux never contacts you again, and you decide to mourn him as dead, rather than contemplate silly alternatives. 

All of nine sweeps old, you stumble upon the greatest realization every highblood eventually discovers in the depths of their soul: the dead are quiet and solemn and the living are rueful and brittle, but all too soon ones become the other, and you know well which ones you prefer. 

)(IC: saved me one shell of a mess to clam up, too  
)(IC: well done

  


* * *

  


__Then said she faintly: “O, contrive some way--  
Some narrow winding turret, quite mine own,  
To reach a loft where I may grieve alone!  
It is a slight thing; hence do not, I pray,  
This last dear fancy slay!” 

__“Such winding ways  
Fit not your days,”  
Said he, the man of measuring eye;  
“I must even fashion as my rule declares,  
To wit: Give space (since life ends unawares)  
To hale a coffined corpse adown the stairs;  
For you will die.” 

  


* * *

  


“I’m still not afraid of you,” you say, loud and clear as you grip the culling fork with white knuckles and your lips pull back into a snarl. 

“I know,” she replies, everything you hate when you catch a glimpse of a mirror, and she’s far larger and stronger and beautiful than you ever thought she’d be, in person. Her smile softens and sharpens all at once, and you see yourself gutted on its edge, when she tilts her head to the side. “All of the others were.” 

You gut her instead, when the prongs of your weapon go through her almost like she’s not even there at all. At ten sweeps old, you learn true fear when she grabs it above your hand and shoves it further in, blood splattering onto her hair, muffled but no less final. 

“I wasn’t afraid, either,” she tells you, her final mocking whisper, while you’re still trying to grasp the fact the first strike is the last, “when it was my turn.” You try to pull it back, to get some space to breathe and process what just happened, but she reels you in closer, until her forehead is touching yours, her crown to your tiara, and you can see the Empire threatening to crush her spine for millennia, in the fading light of her eyes. “That’s how I knew what I had to do.” Her laughter is sweet and all the more terrifying because of it. “That’s how you’ll know what needs to be done.” 

She’s grinning when she goes, slumping forward into your arms in a mockery of a hug, but her arms are colder than yours, and you don’t want what they had to offer. 

Someone hollers _Long Live the Empress_ , and you recoil from it as if it were a curse, suddenly reminded there’s a whole Empire watching your every step, a whole Empire bowing their heads to your victory, hollow as it might be. 

You had a speech planned out, just for this moment. 

You had a precise list of announcements to make, starting by the abolition of the hemospectrum and the beginning of a new era. 

You wanted your first command as Empress to be grand and glorious and defining of the new era the Empire would surely enter under your command. 

Instead, you find a riot threatening to start around you, and the thoughts of magnanimous gestures and unwavering kindness get swept away by the sight of one of the trolls spearheading the revolt around you. He’s strong, of course, you’ve always known him so, but if there’s something highbloods know, is how to subdue unruly psionics that step beyond their station and he’s bloodied and in chains at your feet before you can even pry your culling fork from the carcass still grinning at the world behind you. 

“Enough,” you say, no need to raise your voice when the bloodstains on your dress mean the entire galaxy lives to hang onto your every word. 

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” the troll, who insists imprudently to look and sound like Sollux, snarls at you, lisp and all, and you’re annoyed at him for the disrespect, since Sollux is long dead and you’ve just finished mourning him as it is. “You weren’t supposed to—“ 

“Nothing ever is what it’s supposed to be,” you snap, and he falls silent like the rest, thus proving he’s not Sollux because Sollux never stopped arguing back and keeping you on your toes. “Which is exactly how everything's supposed to be." You remember Eridan and borrow his best sneer for the occasion, before turning to the guards staring at you like a miraculous apparition. "Don’t harm him,” you add, almost as an afterthought, once you take a good look at his face. His left eye is swollen shut and his body is bent in painful ways in places it shouldn’t be. You smile, soft and sharp. “I’ll need a Helmsman when my new ship is finished.” 

You ignore the incredulous look on his face, turning away from the dead quiet of the arena and the thousands of eyes following every step. They came to see an Empress die. They came to see an Empress rise. That none of them can tell who really died and who really won doesn’t matter at all. 

The Empire has an Empress, and all is at it should be. 

**Author's Note:**

> The poem is _Heiress and Architect_ , by Thomas Hardy, which has always been a very _Feferi_ kind of poem to me.


End file.
